Selective Migration and Economic Development: A Generalized Approach

The within-country distribution of brain drain and brain gain effects: A case study on Senegal

“…Cross-country regressions with instrumental-variable techniques show that selective migration tends to enhance both education and the subsequent accumulation of human capital in developing countries (Beine et al, 2001(Beine et al, , 2008(Beine et al, , 2010. This effect is particularly pronounced when focusing on the world's poorest nations, specifically low-income and lower-middle income countries, as confirmed by Cha'Ngom et al (2023). Case studies leveraging quasi-experimental settings find compelling evidence that shocks affecting skill-specific emigration prospects lead to heightened levels of human capital several years down the line -see Shrestha (2017) on Nepal, Abarcar and Theoharides (2021) on the Philippines, Khanna and Morales (2021) on India, and Chand and Clemens (2023) on the Fiji.…”

“…RUM structure. -Migration and education decisions are modeled as outcomes of a Random Utility Model (RUM) with two sources of heterogeneity between individuals (as in Cha'Ngom et al, 2023, Delogu et al, 2018 -in the ability to acquire higher education and in preferences for various destinations. The utility of an individual λ born in region i, choosing education type-s and moving to a destination j is given by:…”

“…which increases with the proportion of remaining college graduates, (1 − m i,h )H i , and decreases with the proportion of remaining low-skilled workers, (1 − m i,l )(1 − H i ). For a given stock of immigrants (I i,s ≡ j̸ =i m ji,s N j,s ), mobility-driven expected utility shocks affecting region i (∆W i,s or ∆W * i,s ) induce ambiguous effects on post-migration human capital accumulation as for a given H i , h i decreases with positive selection, in line with Beine et al (2001Beine et al ( , 2008Beine et al ( , 2010 and Cha'Ngom et al (2023).…”

“…The country-wide average share of college graduates in 2010 is approximately 3.0% Cha'Ngom et al (2023). estimate that this share would be one percentage point lower without selective international migration prospects.…”